Sang Won Lee and his team win CHCI Planning Grant Award

Congratulations to Sang Won Lee and his team on receiving the CHCI Planning Grant Award!

CHCI has awarded the 2024 Planning Grant to Sang Won Lee, Alice Jang, and Dan Dunlop for their proposal titled: How does LLM-based Generative AI affect the value of expertise and the range of valued expertise?

The grand question we propose to explore is: How does LLM-based Generative AI (GAI) affect the value of expertise and the range of valued expertise? We can speculate on complex changes. Some expertise may be devalued at an individual level, as high-quality outcomes can be generated at one's fingertips. However, for complex problems still requiring human intelligence from experts, GAI can pose a significant barrier for humans to achieve expertise, impacting our education. Therefore, in the long run, GAI may lead to difficulty in finding experts, and the value of certain types of expertise may drastically increase due to a lack of supply. 

Another plausible future includes the emergence of novel expertise and the obsolescence of certain existing ones. Just as memorization is no longer a skill we prioritize in education following the availability of external memory aids (e.g., printing, the internet) or how calculators changed our math education, we need to adapt our educational focus to emphasize new skills that will be highly valued as some skills will be partially replaced with technologies. Facing these changes, we need to understand the impact of GAI on expertise acquisition through education and how it will alter the value of expertise in the educational realm. We explore this question in the context of analytical writing and computer science education in higher education.

The funding programs that the PIs will target with a large grant proposal include:

• NSF, Responsible Design, Development, and Deployment of Technologies (ReDDDoT): The goal of this program is to “ensure that ethical, legal, and societal considerations and community values are embedded across technology lifecycles to generate products that promote the public’s well being and mitigate harm.” (Deadline: 04/2025, Max $1.5M)

• NSF, Research on Innovative Technologies for Enhanced Learning (RITEL): This program looks for high-risk, high-return research in “emerging technologies (e.g., AI) for teaching and learning that respond to pressing needs in authentic (real-world) educational environments.” (Deadline: 09/2025, Max $0.9M)

• NSF, Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE): This program seeks to promote transformative approaches to generating and using new knowledge about STEM teaching and learning to improve STEM education (Deadline: 07/2025, Max $2M).

The “CHCI Planning Grants for Large Scale Research Efforts” program seeks to identify and support interdisciplinary teams of researchers in convergent research areas to prepare for submission of large external grant proposals.  In this context, “large” grants are defined as externally funded projects with significant budgets in the context of the topical area of the project and the funding source. A CHCI planning grant will support new or existing teams in performing activities such as team building and project scoping that are necessary to enable the submission of a large competitive proposal in the future. This internal planning grant should lead directly to an external proposal submission as a next step, but the external submission may be a stepping stone to the envisioned large grant (i.e., an external planning grant or small grant).